Games have a weird relationship with morality. For a while, many were including ham-fisted ‘morality systems’ – absurd contrivances where you were presented with two exaggerated choices, choosing between senseless slaughter and saintly forgiveness, and then assigned to be good or evil based on that. These decisions would be reflected in your character’s appearance: If you were good you were hot, and if you were evil you got a bunch of weird scars which made you still hot but in a scary way. This still represents the vast bulk of the way video games interact with morality, if they choose to at all. A few others, like several of the Fallout games, have a bit more nuanced approach: Rather than doing the Good Thing or the Bad Thing, you can instead choose to work with or against a number of factions with different moral priorities and methods. In Fallout: New Vegas, there are several of these at different scales: So you can participate in the large-scale conflict for the future of New Vegas between the NCR and Caesar’s Legion, but you can also choose sides in a number of smaller conflicts, or do favors for certain unaligned groups, which also affects the greater balance of power. I think that, while the latter is less overtly ‘moral’ and is obviously rather abstracted and gameified, it’s in many ways a far more accurate portrayal of how decision-making functions for people and what role morality has in the process.
The prevailing belief about morality is the conservative one: That people will, by default, do whatever gets them an immediate benefit, and the only thing keeping them from unleashing all sorts of mayhem on their peers is fear of reprisal –whether through means judicial, vengeful, or divine. Many of our institutions are built on this belief system, and its precepts run so deep that it often goes unquestioned. This belief, that people are evil by default and any improvement can only be imposed from above, is naturally appealing to those in a position to impose from above – it provides a great excuse for imposing. The conservative interpretation of humanity is that it is directly opposed to morality, and only can be brought to bear by force. While this belief is an erroneous view of human behavior and morality, it’s one which is in some ways similar to the truth – people do not avoid antisocial behavior out of fear of punishment, they do it because it is disapproved-of, because it is improper. Look at the soldier – he goes into battle though he may die, and we call it bravery – which I suppose it is, of a sort. What he is not, though, is afraid of being ‘punished’, even if the outcome of his pursuit may be worse than any punishment. It isn’t the consequence that is feared – it is the transgression against propriety.
There is also a common belief about morality, which one might call the liberal one: That people will, by default, do what they believe to be just, and that conflict is caused by a misalignment of priorities. Not too long ago (but also not too recently), I used to believe this – that every person was the hero of their own story, and while their moral framework might not quite line up with mine, they were still behaving according to whatever set of virtues they believe in, that they were trying their best to be good. This is an appealing perspective since it provides the most optimistic possible spin on any little glance we can get into a person’s interior life, and useful since it can give some insight into the behaviors of others while still maintaining critical distance. I no longer subscribe to this belief, though – people do not, by and large, do what they believe to be morally just, they do what they believe they’re supposed to be doing.
The distinction can be critical. We try to be the best we can – just not necessarily in a moral sense. Once you look at things this way, a lot of otherwise inexplicable behaviors start to make sense. Mass shooters don’t mass-shoot for some inexplicable ‘personal advantage’, or because they believe it to be morally good or because they themselves embody some sort of inexplicable evil – they kill for the same reason the soldier does, because it’s socially sanctioned by their culture, because it is the thing that people like them are expected to do. Virulent racists, misogynists, homophobes, and other assorted bigots are comfortable being such not because they don’t care what people think of them, but because they do. The opinions of those they deem to be members of their own group, the ‘us’ who is against the ‘them’, matter a great deal to them – enough to kill for, to die for. That isn’t to say that it’s solely social pressure that guides us, but that the people around us shape our idea of who we are – and who we perceive ourselves to be determines what we choose to do. This is also why rich people tend to be such assholes: They mostly answer to other rich people, and exist in a world where the role of a person is to accumulate. When you understand the world to be a competition in which everyone is trying to get the highest score, it becomes a zero-sum game, and any matter of depredation upon your fellow humans becomes justified – not moral, perhaps, but simply correct, simply the thing that people do.
We are all constantly building a model of the future in our heads, a little stage-play, and our role in it is determined by an archetype. When it comes time to say our lines, what we say will be determined by the way we understand ourselves. Most of the great moral choices we face are not about what is just, but about whose justice we care about, which justice we want to align ourselves with and fight for. This isn’t to say that we don’t have any innate sense of right or wrong, any personal moral compass – only that this isn’t usually what directly drives our decision making. That moral compass may lead us to seek roles and subcultures we’re morally comfortable in, but once we understand those roles we behave according more to them than what we believe to be morally correct. This is why the Fallout model of morality makes sense: The player may have an internal moral compass, but the game isn’t concerned about this – what gives the player’s choices a moral dimension is because their internal moral understanding will lead them to align with one faction or another, not because the choices are labeled as morally good or bad. I tend to think ‘evil’ is not a useful term, but the extent to which it can be so is the extent to which it describes systems of behavior rather than individual choices. Describing a person as evil is not useful, but describing the systems which shaped them and weaponized them, the systems antithetical to healthy and well-lived lives, describing how the mechanisms of belief and the roles assigned can create outcomes that work directly against the cause of human well-being, can be very useful indeed.
Those of us who write and create art, then, may be responsible for creating these roles, though it’s uncertain how much impact we can have or how to achieve it. In Mother Night, Vonnegut wrote “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” I believe that, as well, we act as we see ourselves to be – so we must be careful who we see ourselves to be. We become whatever role we choose to play – but if the role no longer fits, if our moral compass is pointing away from our heading, we can always choose another role. It might not fix things, but it at least might prevent us from breaking them more.